The 4 to 3 consolidation effect – Hutchison Three Italy halved the gigabytes in its flagship smartphone plan and launched its own zero-rated film store

September 2015

- Ahead of its planned merger with Wind in Italy Hutchison Three has halved the gigabytes in its flagship 4G LTE smartphone mobile internet access plan and launched its own zero-rated (unlimited gigabytes at €0/GB) film store.
- Will GSMA claim again, as they did for Austria using dubious economics, that “...there is no evidence that prices increased...” even though consumers are asked to pay the same price to purchase a smartphone plan that includes half the amount of data volume?
- 36 leading US scholars, in a letter addressed to FCC on January 2015, called for a ban on all forms of paid prioritization (including zero-rating) and highlighted the inadequacy of competition law in addressing all net neutrality violations. The scholars wrote “Antitrust cannot practically prevent the other two competition problems associated with paid prioritization: excessive access charges imposed by terminating monopolists and their incentive to degrade non-priority traffic or set low monthly bandwidth caps”.

In June 2018 Elisa became the first operator in the world to launch commercial service over its 5G (3.5 GHz) network in Tampere Finland and Tallinn Estonia. Elisa invited Rewheel to try its 5G network.